Your Key to Success in Equine Clicker Training (clickertraining.ca)

Posts tagged ‘treat crazy horse’

You Are Allowed to Hand-Feed your darling! No, not allowed, you are ENCOURAGED!

Isn’t that great news? Isn’t that one of the best things of having animals: to feed them? Don’t we all like that? What is better then to hand-feed them andtrain them at the same time!

Finally you found a coach that encourages you to do what is one of the most reinforcing things to do: offering food and letting the horse take it off of your hand! ♥

Don’t let anyone take this away from you. If you are concerned about what would happened if you started using food reinforcers in your training, don’t listen to the general opinion: educate yourself.

Set yourself up for success and learn how you can do it right. Make it fun for you and fun for your horse. Win-win. You get the desired behaviour, your horse gets a wonderful treat (and you get to hand-feed him!)

Read these 2 articles if you want to know how to start safe and use food effectively as reinforcer in training. (You know you can always consult me personally, right? Contact me for a free discovery call.)

Myths about hand-feeding horses

People who use food reinforcers are frequently confronted with a lot of misunderstanding about how “treats” or “rewards” can be effectively used as reinforcers. I asked my Facebook friends to help me out with some common believes that live in the equine world about treats in training. Thank you all for helping me. I will quote the answers:

Hand-feeding creates mugging horses

Hand feeding makes them bite.

That it instantly makes them fat.

Hand feeding horses is bad because it turns them into monsters, they get rude, pushy and bite everyone.

That’s bribing and horses do X only for treats but not out of respect towards the person treating them!

They get Treat Crazy, and will not be able to think or focus on what they are doing.

It will make your horse aggressive pushy and mouthy.

Hand-feeding makes them spoiled and they will refuse to eat out of a bucket and you will have to exchange it for a gilded bowl.

It makes them nippy, aggressive, pushy, space invading.

You can only hand-feed your horse twice.

They’ll kill you if you forget your treat bag once upon a time in the future.

It’s unnatural (as opposed to using carrot sticks and spurs and what not), since horses don’t feed one another in reward for tasks.

It’s super dangerous, for when done incorrectly it turns them into raging killing machines that can never be re-educated.

Only hand-feed grain and hay but not treats because it will send the wrong message to the horse.

I will debunk these in upcoming blogs. I will give you one now.

Myth #5 “Horses won’t respect you”

The believe “That’s bribing and horses do X only for treats but not out of respect towards the person treating them!” is a common one. Here is what I believe if someone says:

Help me and share the believes you are fighting

What comments about hand-feeding or using treats as reinforcers annoy you? Do you need an answer, please leave a comment and I will help you with a science based one.

Safe the date: Thursday March 7, 2019

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Sandra Poppema, B.Sc.

I help horse owners get the results in training they really, really want with joy and easy for both horse and human. I always aim for win-win!

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